Carl Dickson

Should you review your proposal by reading it like the customer? Reviews without defined quality criteria can degrade into editing and proofreading. Editing and proofreading are good things, but you don’t need (or probably want) a senior review team to do editing and proofreading. If they are important, get a specialist to do it. It can be tremendously difficult to wait until the proposal is complete and try to fit in editing before the deadline. Sometimes it’s better to take a little risk and do some editing before the proposal is complete. Or do it in iterations or pieces. But producing a draft, stopping the proposal, and having senior executives do editing and proofreading is probably not the best approach under any circumstances. What about people who want to “see” the proposal before it gets submitted? “Seeing” the proposal should be considered a privilege that must be earned. Reviewing a proposal is a process and not a single step. There is no formal quality methodology in existence that relies on a “hero” showing up at the last minute wanting to change things. If the input is of value and you care about your win rate, you’ll have the most impact by providing that input at the beginning, so the proposal team can build the proposal around it. If your responsibility, authority, or interest is high enough to command attention, you can maximize your impact by playing a role in validating plans and defining the quality criteria. You should get to “see” the developing proposal several times, watch it mature, and confirm it’s on the right track. You shouldn’t even need to see the final proposal because you should already know what’s in it. This is when you’ve earned the privilege of seeing the final proposal. What about the final quality assurance checks? Final quality assurance is about attention to detail. It is not about rank or prior participation in the proposal. If you run your production staff into the ground with last minute changes, you should put equal effort into bringing someone fresh in for final quality assurance. Last minute changes often introduce last minute defects. Proposals can lose because of a missing page or other minor oversight. Assign your most painstakingly thorough reviewer to final quality assurance, and not just whoever is available or left standing. Make sure they have adequate time and a complete checklist of delivery requirements to work with. Isn’t creating quality criteria for a proposal a lot of work? Isn’t rewriting a proposal until you stumble across what it will take to win a lot of work? Not to mention a lot of risk? What if you never find it? Creating proposal quality criteria forces you to develop an understand of what it will take to win before you start writing. How can that not be worth it? How do you know if you’re implementing Proposal Quality Validation correctly? If you get to the draft and can’t articulate your definition of proposal quality, something is wrong. If you perform your reviews and there are things your proposal quality criteria didn’t cover, you need to improve your quality criteria on the next proposal. If your proposal reviews are returning substantial changes, then either the writers are not getting or following the proposal quality criteria before they start, or the quality criteria were inadequate. If you lose a proposal in a preventable way, you need to improve your quality criteria to address the issue going forward. If you get to the review and people aren’t on the same page regarding what the quality criteria should be, you need to improve how you define your proposal quality criteria and possibly include additional stakeholders. Proposal quality criteria become a tool to ensure future improvement are made in a verifiable way.

Are your proposal reviews leaderless? Just because people show up, are enthusiastic, and are willing to work hard that doesn’t mean they are well led. Usually the proposal review function is coordinated by the proposal manager. But if the proposal manager is responsible for creating the proposal and administering the process, does it make sense to add quality validation to that list? How important is quality validation to your win rate? Is it enough to merit some dedicated attention? Consider who does each of the following: Defines proposal quality? Sets the standards? Writes the quality criteria? Decides what procedures to follow? Decides what the format for review deliverables should be? Recruits reviewers? Sets the schedule? Coordinates logistics? Trains reviewers? Tasks reviewers? Prepares briefings? Generates reports about review findings? Decides what should be done about the review outcomes? Is accountable for ensuring the quality criteria are validated? Should all of this pass on to the proposal manager by default? It’s only quality validation. What could go wrong? This is complicated by having review team participants that outrank the proposal manager. When this is the case, it’s often a challenge just to get reviewers to show up. Some proposal managers struggle with getting review team participants to show up having already read the RFP. Training executives to stop reading and rendering opinions, and to validate specific quality criteria can be nearly impossible. If transforming proposal quality is a necessary part of improving your win rate, then consider making implementing proposal quality validation the responsibility of a single individual who is not already herding cats to create the proposal. Assigning a leader for the review function enables someone to force the issue on answering the questions above. The answers are less important than having someone who can give attention to each and ensure that there are answers. Proposal quality is too important to be left unsaid. Good enough is not a competitive strategy. You can assign review team leader pursuit by pursuit, or you can have one person who specializes in proposal quality validation. The advantage to having one person do it is that your quality criteria become better over time. Your processes and procedures will improve too. But getting the entire organization on the same page regarding what proposal quality is and what quality criteria should apply to each proposal is key to continuously improving your win rate. You can view the position as profitable if the improvement to your win rate that results from the improvement in proposal quality pays for the position. And it could easily pay for itself many times over.

Reviewers do not show up already knowing what to do. They don’t know the procedures are to be followed. They don’t know the RFP. They may not even know the proper way to read an RFP. They also may not know how your organization defines proposal quality. They may or may not know the customer. They may not even know how to effectively review a proposal. All of their experience may have come from doing purely subjective proposal reviews instead of performing quality validation. They need training in procedures, methodologies, standards, a background orientation to the pursuit, and the composition of the RFP --- all before they play an effective role in assessing proposal quality. But they all don’t necessarily need the same training. Reviewers need to know how to validate what they have been assigned. You don’t want to overload your reviews by asking them to validate everything in one sitting. Consider some of the things you may need validated: The proposal outline The Proposal Content Plan RFP compliance Win strategies Evaluation score Your offering Terms and conditions Presentation Decisions And more… Will you get the validation you require by asking your reviewers to consider all of them? How many of them? If you split quality validation into multiple reviews, then the reviewers need to focus on the scope of their portion of the review. They need to validate what is assigned to them for validation. Reviewers can still make comments regarding concerns and potential improvements, but that should come after the quality criteria have been validated. People are counting on them for validation so that they know which quality criteria have been fulfilled, and which require additional attention. What someone needs to know to validate compliance is very different from validating win strategies. Or the evaluation score. Or any of the others. You need to train your reviewers to validate the criteria that will be in their area of focus. In proposal quality validation, reviewers have a specific mission. They are not on an open-ended hunting expedition. Their role in the process is to ensure that specific criteria have been fulfilled, and not simply advise. Reviewers need training because the odds are some will show up with other expectations. Having the reviewers participate at the beginning in defining the quality criteria is an excellent form of training that also helps achieve buy-in when it is time to validate quality criteria fulfillment. Your reviewers must be capable of performing the kind of validation required. For example: To validate that the proposal is capable of achieving the maximum score, the review must understand the customer's evaluation procedures and preferences. To validate RFP compliance, the review may need technical subject matter expertise and understand how to interpret the customer’s requirements. To validate that the offering is the best you are capable of providing, the review may need to understand the technical subject matter, the price to win, and the customer’s preferences regarding the solution. You will often find people to contribute to proposal quality validation reviews who know some of what is needed, but not all. You might use a combination of staff to fill gaps. But all of them will need some training to understand how to apply what they know to achieving your quality validation goals. To have a well-trained review team you need: Training in your review methodology To have defined your procedures ahead of the review, so you can explain them Training in how to read the RFP ahead of the review An orientation briefing to provide background on the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment An introduction to the quality criteria they are responsible for validating and any additional training they need to be able to perform that validation It helps to start with reviewers who have the right background for the scope of quality criteria they will be validating. But it takes more than just the right background to be an effective proposal quality validation reviewer.

It’s good to use quality criteria at the back end to review your proposals. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to only use quality criteria after the proposal is written. Or to create your quality criteria after the proposal has been written. It’s much better to put the effort into creating your quality criteria at the very beginning so that proposal contributors receive the quality criteria when they receive their writing assignments. This enables them to create a first draft that meets the quality expectations. You can accelerate things if you start from a base of standard, reusable proposal quality criteria. It will also help if you build creating your quality criteria into your Proposal Content Planning efforts. Proposal Content Planning provides instructions to proposal writers regarding what to write and how to write it. In fact, an easy approach to Proposal Quality Validation is to simply check and make sure those instructions were followed. When you add your proposal quality criteria to the content plan, the writers also get guidance that tells them how to know when their sections have been written correctly. This combination of what to write and how to know if it’s written correctly is so important, it’s a wonder that all proposals aren’t prepared that way. Instead, companies often leave proposal writers to figure it all out themselves and then judge them after the draft has been completed. This is so obviously inefficient and uncompetitive that it’s a wonder any proposals are still prepared that way. The entire proposal effort is about winning in a competitive environment. Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation are not ends in themselves. They are simply about organizing effort to win, instead of merely completing a document. You should put the least amount of effort into them that you can without losing. If you honestly believe you’ll achieve a proposal that can beat all competitors by not giving any quality criteria to your proposal writers, then skip it. Of course, your competitors have probably done the math and realize that it’s a comparatively small investment of effort with a potentially huge return. And when you do it on proposal after proposal, that return just piles up.

We've been at this since 2001 and have published over 867 articles and 532 proposal recipes. But the articles we wrote in 2018 include some of the most useful and insightful that we've ever published. That is, if you look past the titles. The titles don't do the practical value of the content the justice it deserves. That's something I'm going to have to work on in 2019. In 2018, we had over 210,000 visitors. That's a lot of people interested in winning proposals. Thank you for all that attention. Feel free to spread the love and use the social media buttons to share your favorites. Best free articles of 2018 How to write an Executive Summary for a proposal from the customer’s perspective 29 techniques for dealing with uncooperative proposal contributors Do this one thing and win all your proposals Why the customer does not care about the story you are telling in your proposal Proposal writing for people who are not writers Winning government contracts like you’re trying to get good at it Everything I needed to know about proposal writing I learned from writing the introduction paragraph How to explain to your customer why you should win the proposal Succeeding with a high volume of proposals Why proposal professionals are better than proposal heroes Best premium articles of 2018 In addition to the articles above, we've prepared a list of the best additions to our premium content library for Proposal risks, issues, and quality validation Focusing on self-assessment for proposal quality instead of reviews How detailed should your proposal quality criteria be? Conducting proposal reviews based on quality criteria What are proposal quality criteria and how do you create them? How to turn Proposal Quality Validation into a checklist and forms driven process How many proposal reviewers do you need? How many proposal reviews should you have? Management models for Proposal Content Planning implementation Quality criteria for assessing whether an RFP compliance matrix has been completed correctly 2019 will bring a lot more goodies We've started working on what we think of as Version 2 of the MustWin Process as part of the premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. The biggest changes are that The MustWin Process is becoming explicitly goal-based and all tasks are measured by their desired outcomes. It not only covers what to do, but how you know when you've done things correctly. The MustWin Process will provide multiple options that support achieving the goals you need in order to win. It provides examples of what you can do to achieve your goals instead of mandating that you do things a particular way. This will help capture and proposal managers apply the process to their particular environments and solve the problems they face. It also makes it easier to execute the process. The new approach to providing options is especially useful for expanding support for pre-RFP pursuit. Before the only option provided was Readiness Reviews. The new version starts with the goal of arriving at RFP release prepared to win with an information advantage, and uses Readiness Reviews as one way to achieve this. Other options will address getting ready to win from the lead qualification, capture, and proposal input perspectives. Your needs will determine the best way to achieve the goal in your organization. Proposal Content Planning and quality criteria development are being explained in much more detail while simultaneously being made much more flexible. A new layer of risk management and issue tracking is being added and integrated with Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation. Miscellaneous changes include some reformatting and reorganization to make the navigation easier. And a ton of miscellaneous improvements are also being made along the way, based on the new material we've published since the MustWin Process was first released in 2010. The concepts are already there in the articles we've published. We're just integrating them, streamlining the user interface, filling some gaps, and making sure the explanations are clear and practical. But what we're really doing is turning all that content into something even more useful during proposal development. We're also continuing to enhance the online proposal tool we've built for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. In 2018 we released the first version of the MustWin Performance Support Tool. We think of it as comparable to Windows v1.0. In 2019 we have a bunch of updates planned. It will not only expand to cover the pre-RFP phase of pursuit, but will also gain functionality for cross-referencing basically everything and evolve into what one tester described as a "proposal prototyping" tool. We're also expanding customization and content saving that will provide you with several new options for proposal re-use. What we're finding is that the platform lets you function as if your process is more mature than it really is. The MustWin Process is built in, but it's more like you just don't have to think about process so much. It points the way to what you need to do and shows you how to do it. You end up with better information to work with and better use of that information, leading to a much better quality proposal that's easier to produce. It still doesn't do the proposal for you. But if your priority is winning, it has some serious advantages over paper-based processes.

Hinz Consulting has a partnership with CapturePlanning.com, LLC, the company behind PropLIBRARY. Hinz Consulting is tailoring the MustWin Process and other PropLIBRARY content to meet the needs of our consultants and customers. This page provides information from Hinz Consulting and links to the content that Hinz recommends and has tailored. Key Resources for Hinz Consulting Useful links for consultants who work for Hinz Consulting Useful links for customers of Hinz Consulting Link to the Hinz Academy: Proposal Developer Immersive Boot Camp Coursework Portal The version of the MustWin Process that Hinz Consulting has tailored for use in our customer engagements

All of the risks, issues, and problems you consider during the early stages of proposal planning should be reflected in your proposal quality criteria. Your goal is to prompt reviewers to consider the risks and issues in addition to the draft so they can validate their resolution. You can use Proposal Quality Validation to achieve an integrated approach to proposal risk and issue management. Tracking problems by writing them down on paper or on a whiteboard can only take you so far. Imagine having a help desk ticketing system for your issues. Each issue gets assigned a priority, is given a mitigation approach, and assigned to someone responsible. If it is not responded to in time, it is escalated to a higher level. Why would you want to put all that effort into it? Because when you lose, the odds are extremely high that it was because of a risk or issue that you knew about but did not sufficiently mitigate. All that investment in the proposal could be wasted because you didn’t validate that the risk or issue was resolved. The amount of effort you put into tracking your risks and issues and validating their resolution should be proportionate to the amount of impact they could have. Otherwise, you are just gambling on whether you are in denial about the risk or not. You may not need an actual ticket tracking system for your proposal risks and issues, but you might want to emulate the concepts by: Identifying your proposal, offering, competitive, and performance risks. This is essentially a list, but should reflect risk severity, document mitigations, and be assigned to a responsible party. Monitoring your risks so you know when they transition from potential risks to actual issues. Assigning issues for resolution. Tracking issues through resolution to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. Escalating issues that are not resolved on schedule. Validating that the mitigations and resolutions are sufficient. Functionally, there is very little difference between: A proposal assignment A Proposal Content Plan instruction An issue that has been assigned for resolution What does Proposal Quality Validation have to do with risks and issue tracking? While Proposal Quality Validation is a way to assess the quality of the proposal, it also has broader potential, because it provides a means to validate the fulfillment of your quality criteria. If your proposal quality criteria address risk and issue resolution, then Proposal Quality Validation can become part of how you ensure the risks and issues will not jeopardize your proposal. Doing this requires you to declare your risks and issues. Not only do you need to document them (how isn’t terribly important), but you need to validate that these are all of your risks and issues. Even if you have daily “stand up” meetings, have you really validated that you have identified all of the risks and issues you need to be concerned about? Once you are satisfied that you have identified them, how do you validate their resolution? What do you do about unresolved risks and issues? Do you monitor them? Do you validate your monitoring to ensure nothing can slip through the cracks? Streamlining things and avoiding denial In the same way that Proposal Quality Validation can be streamlined into simple checklists, its application to risk and issue tracking can also be made checklist simple. The challenge isn’t tracking. Paper and whiteboards work pretty well for that. The challenge is how to avoid people being in denial about the risks. In my experience, this is the real number one reason why proposals lose (even though everyone claims it’s price). Companies lose proposals because of risks they knew about and thought they had overcome, when they really hadn’t. Companies lose because they were in denial. The only cure for that is to explicitly surface and identify the ways things could go wrong and to intentionally validate your mitigations and resolutions. If denial is the number one reason for losing, then eliminating denial could be the number one way to improve your win rate.

The higher the quality of the draft, the less important your proposal reviews become. The disruption they can cause also decreases. This makes investing in getting the first draft right worth the effort. They need some way to compare what they have written to what is required. If you haven’t defined quality for them, they can only guess at it. In addition to defining proposal quality, you need quality criteria that can be used to measure whether the definition has been fulfilled. Quality criteria are a critical part of proposal quality validation, but they can also be used as a self-assessment tool before you even get to the review stage. Self-assessment is especially important in organizations that lack resources. If the only people who have the right experience and subject matter expertise are working on the proposal, who do you get to perform quality validation? If you develop your quality criteria, then subject matter experts and writers can assess their own work. The problem with people reviewing their own work is that they overlook things — sometimes on purpose. With self-assessed quality validation the goal is to keep honest people honest. You provide quality criteria so they don’t overlook anything. But unless you have someone else perform quality validation, it is possible for them to ignore the criteria. There is a trade-off here between reliability and convenience. Your circumstances, such as whether you can trust your own staff, will determine the best way to make that trade-off decision. Also, it can be really hard to break organizations of the idea that quality comes from having someone read the proposal. If you have self-assessment and then someone reads the proposal for “quality assurance,” it’s very easy for that to degrade into subjective reviews that don’t actually deliver quality. They may deliver some improvement, but then again, they may cause more disruption than improvement. Simply reading the proposal and rendering opinions, no matter how experienced the staff offering those opinions, does not validate that quality has been fulfilled. And yet, there always seems to be at least one stakeholder who wants to ignore the quality criteria and simply read the proposal. Performing quality criteria-based proposal self-assessment makes it easier to implement a more traditional quality control/quality assurance approach. The primary review is the self-assessment. But you also have secondary reviews, even if they are just of a sample, to catch when your primary self-assessment quality control is failing. There are a few challenges you have to overcome to implement proposal quality self-assessment: You must create and validate your quality criteria before the writing starts. This is easier if you standardize a portion of your quality criteria. You must successfully shift from treating back-end reviews as the primary review, to treating them as a secondary review of lesser importance. You must train or retrain everybody regarding how proposal reviews should be performed. You must address accountability. Do you require people to actually complete and submit the checklists? How do you know that the self-assessments occurred? The best part about building your proposal process around self-assessment is that it minimizes the need for back-end reviews. But that’s only true if people are diligent about performing their self-assessments. You have to be able to trust your writers. But trust runs both ways. Your writers have to be able to trust your reviewers as well.

Should your quality criteria be few and broad or numerous and detailed? Should they specify exactly what to write, or should they verify that things were considered? The depth of your quality criteria depends on a number of factors, including the consistency of your proposals and the level and variety of subject matter expertise required to figure out what to write. Are you trying to identify criteria based on areas of potential issues, or the issues themselves? Is your goal to verify that the proposal writers have considered things or to verify that they have written things in a certain way? Each topic or even individual criterion might be at a different level of depth, depending on your need for quality validation of that item. If every proposal is a unique and highly technical solution to a unique set of RFP requirements, then you may not be able to specify exactly what to write. But you can use quality criteria to verify that everything that should have been considered or at least mentioned is present. On the other hand, if you are offering a commodity, then you may be able to predict exactly what will need to be presented and how to present it, so your instructions may be very specific. Depending on your circumstances, your quality criteria may verify that the proposal writers have: Considered a topic Addressed a topic Addressed a topic sufficiently Addressed a topic in a particular way You can also make your quality criteria conditional or provide multiple options. What will it take to achieve acceptable quality? What will the proposal your company wants to submit look like or contain? If you do not know the answers to these questions, you should not start writing in the hope of somehow discovering it. Do you know what you need to know to be detailed? Do you have the subject matter expertise to create quality criteria based on the details of what you are proposing? Or are you confirming that topics have been addressed? Do you need the proposal to have a plan, or is it enough to have a plan for delivering a plan? The right level of detail in your proposal quality criteria should be based on the level of detail you want to drive into the proposal, but sometimes you may have to word your criteria around what you know and what you don’t. Achieving the right quality balance How many proposal quality criteria become too many? When do you have so many that reviewers start skipping them or glossing over them? This is somewhat dependent on how many reviews and how many reviewers you have available, as well as the length and complexity of your proposals. How you word your quality criteria has a major impact on how the reviewers assess them, and whether they do it consistently when there are multiple people involved. Ideally, quality criteria should be objective. It helps to formulate them as questions, to guide the reviewers to consider the answers. This is especially true when you have to ask difficult to answer questions like "Is this section RFP compliant?" Even if there is no obvious gap in compliance, the answer may depend on a subjective assessment of the level of detail. The standard in these cases should be “What will the customer consider compliant?” But that is also subjective. If you can't make a criterion perfectly objective, then use your criteria to surface the issue. For difficult decisions or assessments, you want to drive discussion that leads to a corporate decision regarding what the right approach for your proposal is.

In order to implement Proposal Quality Validation, you need to plan a set of reviews to validate that your quality criteria have been fulfilled. But how many reviews do you need to achieve this? What you review is more important than how you review it, or even how many reviews you have. You should have enough reviews to cover all of your quality criteria without overloading your reviewers. You can’t have too many reviews, provided the reviews are small, focused, and support rather than impede proposal development. Small frequent reviews can resemble checklists. While it may seem easier to only have a couple of major proposal reviews, they tend to produce train wrecks, and only having one proposal review can be worse than not having any. This is especially true when the reviews cover so much material that reviewers can’t possibly consider it all and when the reviews come too late to make any substantive changes. Start by defining your quality criteria Regardless of the number of reviews you have, you should start by defining your proposal quality criteria. Reviews can’t be consistently effective without defining proposal quality. Do this by creating proposal quality criteria that are based on what you need to validate in order to achieve a proposal based on what it will take to win. Do not define your quality criteria based on how many reviews you think you should have. Once you know what you need to validate, then you can allocate the criteria to a number of reviews. Using your quality criteria to drive your proposal reviews Each time you accomplish a goal, you should have a review to validate whether the goal was indeed accomplished. This is especially important when the output of one activity will be used as the input for the next. If you do not validate the inputs, then the next activity could fail as a result of bad input. In practice, this becomes simply checking your work before doing something else based on it. This is using quality validation to ensure prior work is reliable, with the goal of preventing late detection of problems that require large amounts of rework. To do this, you need quality criteria that define successful activity accomplishment and goal fulfillment. See our examples of allocating quality criteria to milestones. Wrapping your activities and goals with quality criteria to use during fulfillment as well as after makes accomplishing tasks much less overwhelming. It provides the criteria for measuring success to the people who are doing the work. This achieves much better results than surprising people at the review with unexpected expectations. Your quality criteria not only drive how many proposal reviews you should have, but they also drive how many reviewers you need to participate. When and where should you hold your proposal reviews? When and where to hold your proposal reviews is purely a logistical matter. If you need people collocated to validate your quality criteria, then do that. If you can validate a quality criterion by texting it to a particular subject matter expert and don’t need confirmation from others, then do that. When and where you hold your proposal reviews only becomes an issue when it impacts the reliability of your quality validation. In other words, don’t hold your reviews too late. Or in a time or place where people aren’t able to focus on the quality criteria. Whether to hold reviews in a formal meeting in a conference room, or let people do the review while working from home, is up to you. You can also have a mixture of formal and informal reviews. Consider the number of reviewers, scope of the quality criteria, and importance of the milestone when deciding when and where to hold a given review. If you start from a list of the proposal quality criteria you need to validate, you can group them based on when they should be validated, whether they require specialized expertise, whether they should be consensus driven or require a particular approval, etc.

Proposal quality criteria give you the means to measure the quality of your proposal. Before you can create quality criteria for your proposals, you must define proposal quality. Your proposal quality criteria tell you what you must accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Defining proposal quality and creating quality criteria are critical parts of achieving Proposal Quality Validation. While this is easy to understand, creating your proposal quality criteria is a bit more challenging. Consider: Are you trying to catch mistakes, or are you trying to win? You should be trying to do both, but how you word your quality criteria will prompt people what to focus on. Quality criteria phrased as testable questions can prompt inspections. Your quality criteria can: Ask whether something was done Check on whether a requirement, specification, or preference was fulfilled Look for particular problems that you’ve seen before Remind reviewers to look for and flag unsubstantiated claims Prompt people when to perform proofreading Quality criteria can also look for the positive and encourage improvement. They can prompt the reviewer to look for the attributes that you think drive quality proposals. Does every key feature cited have a benefit? Does every section make a point about our differentiators and add up to the reasons why the customer should select us? Does every paragraph address something that matters to the customer? It is a good idea to have multiple proposal reviews so that you can target some quality criteria at early stages and others at later stages. Before and after When you create your list of quality criteria using testable questions, and refine it down to an appropriate number of things that are really important, you’ll see that it is not just a tool to use at the back end to check for defects. It’s a writing tool. The writers need the quality criteria to guide their efforts. A list of quality criteria is like a cheat sheet for proposal writing. The quality criteria inform the writers of exactly what they need to accomplish. But you have to create your quality criteria before the writing starts in order to accomplish this. And the quality criteria themselves must be reviewed in order to ensure they are valid. The last thing you want is to build your proposal around flawed quality criteria. You also need to make sure that your reviewers actually follow the quality criteria. But this brings us back to the need to get away from open-ended subjective reviews and enter a world where proposal quality is intentionally and specifically validated. This requires training for your reviewers, since many will be expecting just to show up, read, and render their opinions, just like they have in the past. Involving the reviewers in defining and validating the quality criteria themselves can also help.

You can accelerate your proposal quality validation efforts by identifying the quality criteria you want to apply to all proposals ahead of time. You can even turn them into checklists. If you provide an opportunity to create additional quality criteria that are specific to the pursuit, you can accelerate without watering down your criteria. This requires thinking through your standard quality criteria before you start your proposal. If you start a proposal without already having prepared your checklists, you should follow the Here is some help for how to articulate your quality criteria. Next identify quality criteria relevant to the proposal sections you anticipate having in your proposals. For example: technical approach and management approach. Take it down to the level of granularity that fits your organization. Within management, do you need standard quality criteria for organization, staffing, project management, or others? Treat these as modular add-ons for your baseline criteria. Next identify quality criteria that are relevant to each line of business, offering, or technical domain that are relevant to what your organization offers. Treat these as more add-ons for your baseline criteria. If you have known or repeat customers, consider whether you can pre-identify criteria based on customer insight and awareness. Treat these as more add-ons for your baseline criteria. Create generic quality criteria that are relevant to every RFP you receive. For example, "Did you follow the instructions?" and "Is the wording optimized according to the evaluation criteria?" These are also add-ons for your baseline criteria. Finally, create a form for identifying quality criteria that are specific to this pursuit. While you might be able to identify some of the subjects that should be considered, the criteria themselves will be unique. This is the final add-on for your baseline criteria. While the more effort you put in this category, the better, it is the icing on the cake. For high-volume proposals, you might not put a lot of effort here and rely solely on your standard quality criteria. When you combine the baseline with the add-ons, you get a set of quality criteria you can quickly assemble. Format each set as a checklist. For a new proposal, you start with the page(s) for the standard quality criteria and add the page(s) for the relevant sections, offering/domain, customer, and standard RFP. Then create a checklist for the pursuit specific criteria and you have all the quality criteria you need to validate the quality of your proposal.

You need enough reviewers to cover your quality criteria. Some reviewers can be specialized. For example, one or more reviewers to focus on whether your proposal is RFP compliant, whether the technical offering is the best your organization can offer, whether you have the right bid strategies, and whether your positioning reflects your company’s strategic plan. They might all be validated by different people. Or combined into one review by a single person with the right background. You can have reviews that consist of one person validating a single quality criterion that is performed remotely while proposal development continues in parallel. Or you can have a formal assessment against a list of quality criteria by a team of reviewers. Start by allocating quality criteria to reviews. Then look at the scope of quality criteria required for each review and determine whether you have one or more reviewers with the knowledge and skills to cover all of your quality criteria. If the scope of the quality criteria is too broad for one person, then split it up among multiple reviewers. Along the way, you’ll also need to decide whether you need second, third, or more opinions on certain quality criteria. For example, in some companies you may need several people to validate bid strategies. In addition to grouping the proposal quality criteria that can be reviewed at the same time, you can also group the quality criteria that can be validated by the same reviewer. This enables you to allocate your criteria to the fewest number of reviewers as possible. Be careful though, you don’t want to overload any single reviewer. Keeping track of who has been assigned which quality criteria can alert you when you need to engage an additional reviewer. It also gives you flexibility when a reviewer is unexpectedly not available, and it can help you assess the impact of engaging additional reviewers as backups or for second opinions. Finally, consider what your organization needs in terms of consensus and approval. It is not enough to validate to your personal satisfaction that all quality criteria have been fulfilled. Others need to accept that the quality of the proposal is valid. You may even have team members from other companies who need to be involved. Which stakeholders need to be on review teams in order to achieve necessary buy-in will vary by company and impacts the number of reviewers you will need to participate, as well as who they should be.

In the name of efficiency, you want to streamline the number of proposal reviews you have. However, doing so exposes you to a conflict with proposal quality. On top of this, the number of reviews is not even what impacts efficiency the most. Having fewer, but larger reviews that can’t possibly consider everything does not increase efficiency and decreases quality. On the other hand, more reviews and more reviewers can increase the logistical burden. The key question is “What is the fewest number of reviews you need to validate the number of quality criteria you have?” The best way to increase review efficiency is to make the act of reviewing easier. Most people do not consider this, because they wrongly assume that reviewing means reading the entire proposal while considering every possible issue. A quality criteria based review can be checklist simple. If the scope of a review is to validate criteria fulfillment for a particular milestone (such as completion of the Proposal Content Plan) and you have less than a dozen or so criteria to consider, your reviews become a lot more focused, more objective, and results will be more consistently effective. When you have one open-ended draft review that is supposed to cover everything, your review will drag on and people will start to skip things. Lots of quick, easy, highly focused reviews will deliver better quality than one big, inconsistent, and burdensome subjective review. You can still have an open-ended draft review if you want, but it becomes less important and no longer your primary means of achieving proposal quality. In proposal quality validation, the most important reviews are the early ones. For example, it’s critical to validate the proposal outline before you start writing. Your Proposal Content Plan review is often more important than the draft review. Holding large late stage reviews leads to discovering problems that require extensive rework becoming train wrecks. Late stage reviews should be about tweaking wording, with bid strategies, proposal structure, what to offer, how to make best use of the page limitation, etc., already having been validated. If you are rethinking during late stage reviews, you did not adequately perform your earlier reviews and need to reform either your quality criteria, reviewer training, review procedures, or all three. In addition to allocating your quality criteria to milestones, you can also group the quality criteria that can be reviewed at the same time. If you can avoid allocating too many criteria to a single review, you can use this approach to consolidate your reviews and reduce their number. Another consideration is what review method is needed for each of your quality criteria. Some may require a team to review, while others can safely be reviewed by an individual. Sometimes reviews are best conducted in person, while others can be done remotely. These factors can impact the number of reviews you need. Many small quick reviews, that validate as little as a single quality criterion performed as a process of elimination is the best way to ensure that all of your quality criteria get appropriate attention and you end up with a proposal whose quality has been thoroughly validated. Lumping everything into one, or even a couple, of big reviews doesn’t make it any easier, can be more disruptive, and risks reviewers not being able to give everything the necessary attention. If you think about it, every assignment should come with a definition of success. That definition should be expressed as quality criteria. The completion quality of some assignments can be self-assessed. Some will require another set of eyes. Some may require an approval or additional opinions. But a quick check of the completion of every assignment along the way will produce better results than a marathon review at the tail end of the proposal. Build your quality validation in by defining quality criteria for every assignment and then make all those reviews checklist simple. If one company implements Proposal Quality Validation and another sticks with its outdated all-encompassing too-little too-late proposal review, which do you think will win?

Proposal specialists tend to obsess on building a process based on writing and reviewing. Pricing is an after-thought. What happens when you reverse that? What happens when you build the process around what it takes to produce a winning price proposal instead? What does the proposal process look like from the pricing perspective? What are the strategies and positioning that will drive the pricing? Is the intended offering price realistic and competitive? Is the pricing model RFP compliant? What is the Basis of Estimate (BOE) for the proposed offering and does the result reflect the strategies and positioning? What materials, costs, or other pricing data must be researched and how will they be validated? Has all of the required pricing data been received? Is it accurate? Is the resulting pricing realistic and competitive? Has the pricing been prepared in a way that is RFP compliant and is it ready for submission? This parallels the process used in the narrative proposal to describe the proposed offering. They correspond with the same things needed for developing the offering and presenting it. What this means is that your pricing and offering are closely related and co-dependent. The pricing proposal must not only be developed in parallel with the narrative proposal, but a failure to integrate pricing along the way puts your win rate at just as much of a risk as a reduction in the quality of the narrative proposal. Maybe even more of a risk. This also means that it is just as effective to drive the structure of the proposal process by the pricing proposal as it is to drive it by proposal writing. For some companies, it might make more sense to start formalizing its proposal process by implementing a pricing process that drives decisions regarding strategy, positioning, offering design, and BOE validation. This can establish a framework with milestones for things like strategy development and planning that can be used to develop the process for the narrative proposal. A chaotic pricing proposal experience is a sign of a broken narrative proposal process. A chaotic pricing proposal experience means that the information needed to prepare a winning price proposal was not delivered in an orderly manner. If you look at the list above, this information does not magically appear, nor is it produced in a single step or handoff. To achieve a quality pricing proposal, you must have an orderly well-planned pursuit that is based on: Customer awareness that provides an information advantage Solutioning that makes the right trade-off decisions A plan for achieving RFP compliance A BOE that fulfills your bid strategies and makes your offering the customer’s best alternative When these things are well coordinated and validated, you get a higher quality pricing proposal and a more competitive proposal overall. While we are used to looking at the proposal process from the perspective of developing the narrative proposal, you can also start from the perspective of the price proposal and back into the process for the narrative. The two go hand in hand. Work that you do on one part of the process should be fully integrated and support success in the other. And yet the two sides are often done in isolation with little integration between the two. Those who care about their win rates and competitiveness should see an opportunity here to gain a competitive advantage by excelling in an area their competitors ignore.

People don’t flourish on their own. People are the most successful at winning business when they understand what is expected of them and know how to define success for their tasks. A little motivation helps, but it’s not the only thing required. Every assignment should be wrapped with guidance and tools that enable your people to know whether they are doing things correctly. And this should not simply take the form of other people. The model of people telling people what to do and then subjectively judging whether they did it right is not the best way to maximize your win rates. Instead of building your company around people, try building it around performance support for those people. Of course, this requires institutional knowledge of what is required for success. And investment in how to do tasks well instead of just throwing people at problems. This is what building a company really is. It's not just hiring some talented folks. It's about everything you need to surround those people with in order for them to flourish. And that's more than an office, a desk, and a chair. It's also the knowledge and awareness of how to accomplish new tasks as individuals and how to best work together to perform successfully. People don't show up knowing these things. Good people will show up willing. They'll show up with ideas of their own. But they'll show up as individuals and you'll be asking them to do some things they've never done before, with people who are new to them, and no institutional knowledge about your company. They need clarity of expectations, channels for collaboration, guidance, resources and a definition of what success is and quality criteria to measure it by. You should build your company around what is required for successful performance, and not just people or process. Like most proposal specialists, I was taught to obsess on implementing a solid proposal process. Process is vital for both efficiency and effectiveness. I’ve learned that it is also not enough to maximize performance. People try to supplement process with training, and mostly fail. People try to tack on some reviews at the back end of a proposal and call it “quality assurance.” And mostly fail. If you want people to mostly succeed, you need to combine process, training, and quality assurance into one thing. Every step, every task, every assignment should include all three. You should build around what is required for successful performance, and not just people or process. It doesn’t have to be that hard: Build the process around goals instead of tasks. Make the process self-explanatory. Build in discovery where the process needs to adapt. Link the process to the templates, tools, and resources people need to accomplish it. Link the process to just-in-time training available for those who need it, at the moment of need. Create checklists to be used by both the people performing the process and the people reviewing the work produced. Make it easy to track issues, keep track of information, and get input from others. Make proposal assignments about fulfilling goals and quality criteria instead of simply about creating deliverables. When we first built PropLIBRARY, we built it to expand the MustWin Process we developed for pursuing and capturing leads. Originally, we published it as a workbook. I really liked the workbook we published. But on PropLIBRARY we started linking in ways that just can’t be done on paper. We started creating performance support software that makes it easier to accomplish the goals for each phase of the process, wrapping each step with guidance and quality assurance checklists. Along the way, we’ve learned a few things. The first eye opener was discovering how much more natural it is to work in an environment where the things you need or need to do are all one click away. The process is no longer linear. It’s… available. Every task has explanation, guidance, training, and quality criteria. It fulfills the needs of the people executing the process instead of asking people to do what the process demands. Reviews are less like milestones, and more like checking your own work, or having someone check it for you. On demand. Issues and problems become something that’s itemized and can be eliminated, instead of fodder for endless meetings. If you are clever, you may not need software to support performance like this. It does make things easier, and the software we’ve developed has opened our eyes to a different way of working. But it’s software that’s not about automation, but rather software that’s more like a concierge, a coach, and a coordinator. If you address what people need to be able to successfully perform, they can flourish. If you hire them, task them, leave them on their own, and criticize them when they fail, they will try. But you want better than that. You want to win. Every proposal. People matter. But support for their performance matters more. That’s what you should build your company around.

Topics might include... Developing capabilities that differentiate your company and give customers a reason to care about you Building growth into your corporate culture Improving your competitiveness How your approach to risk can save or hurt your company Using oversight to improve your customer relations and protect your past performance Organizing to improve collaboration and decision making Competing with the big dogs Winning more of what you bid Lead qualification Developing your proposal organization Designing the winning offering I’m looking for a group of government contractor executives to participate in one online meeting a month that will address strategic planning and issues critical for growth and success. We’ll be taking about the topics typically addressed in a strategic plan, but instead of treating it as an annual exercise that creates a document that sits on a shelf collecting dust, each month we’ll delve into a topic that you can use to drive your entire company to think about and make improvements. What really makes it work is the selection of topics. I’ve done strategic planning this way before and it’s a game changer. It gets you out of fire-fighting mode and gives you a manageable way to think, take action, and shape your business. It’s a great way to start building the right structures and culture, without putting it off until it’s too late and limits your growth. By doing this as a group, you’ll be able to share the costs. Exactly how low we can drive them will depend on the number of companies participating, but I think it could be around $2,400 per company. For the full year. Compared to hiring an executive level consultant directly, this could cut costs by 70%! And just to add value ($2,000 worth of added value), I’ll throw in a 5-user Corporate Subscription to PropLIBRARY. And on top of the group sessions, I’ll offer one free call per company per month so we can talk in private about whatever’s causing you pain, something you’d like an outside opinion on, or whatever information or advice I can humbly offer. That sounds like a pretty compelling package to me, and just the sort of thing that can make getting the kind of expert advice your small business needs a lot more affordable. How to find out more about participating Use the button below to declare your interest. You can include a message with any questions and introduce your company. I’ll get in touch and when the group moves forward we’ll finalize the topics, vote on the best date/time each month, and set a start date. If we get an overwhelming response, we’ll set up multiple groups so that each doesn’t get too big for individual attention. Our target audience is the executive level because this will be geared to decision makers, change agents, and leaders. We don't care about actual titles or who you might have on the speakerphone with you. I'm interested. Tell me more...

Proposal Content Planning can be implemented with different management models. Should the content plan be given to writers or should the writers participate in creating the content plan? This will vary according to your corporate culture and the complexity of your offering. Should all stakeholders be involved? Is your company centralized or decentralized? How are decisions made at your company? What is the balance between consensus and authority? Content planning can be done with each of these approaches to management. Implementing Proposal Content Planning requires you to determine what management model is the best fit for your organization. You need to address not only who will participate, but who will decide, and what approaches will be used to gather the required information and review the content plan prior to using it to write the proposal. The key questions you should ask to develop your management model for content planning are: Who will write the instructions? Who will contribute information? Who will review the content plan? If the management model is up to you, consider: Is your goal to deliver a plan that’s ready for writers to implement, or is it to involve people with the necessary subject matter expertise and authority to figure out and discover what should go into the proposal and how it should be presented? Do you have the information you need to do it centrally? Do the stakeholders have the knowledge and skills to contribute? Who makes decisions regarding the approaches to be proposed and how it will be presented? There are often multiple groups involved, such as specialists in sales, technical, executive, and proposals. Stakeholders can participate in content planning in multiple ways. They can participate directly by creating or editing the instructions. Or they can be interviewed by someone else who will create the instructions. Once you have a management model and are clear about your goals, the next step is to consider what form will the instructions should take. The way you write your instructions can direct, inform, teach, or ask. They can facilitate collaboration regarding what to write or specifically direct what to write. The content planning methodology enables you to guide participants through what they need to do to figure out what should be written and how. How much and what kind of guidance do they need? How should you use content plans to improve the quality of your proposals? Once you have chosen your management model and begun creating your content plan, remember that part of the methodology involves creating the quality criteria that will be used for Proposal Quality Validation. Can you do this on your own? How will reviewers be introduced to the quality criteria and be taught how to perform a review using them? Who will review the content plan itself to ensure it contains the right quality criteria and instructions? Proposal Content Planning also provides the potential to implement interesting metrics and gain insight into progress and success drivers across multiple proposals. Who should be involved in inserting the instructions needed, tracking the metrics, performing analytics based on them, and using the results to provide feedback and continuous improvement? At this level, Proposal Content Planning becomes about more than just the current proposal and gives you a tool for objective organizational improvement. If you aspire to operate at this level, the management model you use to implement Proposal Content Planning should reflect this.

Most companies obsess over lead generation, when it's their win rate that ultimately determines their success. If your company lives or dies on its ability to win proposals, then everything depends on your win rate. Very few companies understand it, and even fewer build their companies around it. The ones that do are successful. The ones that don't aren't really in business, they are just gambling. Once you realize the importance of your win rate on your ROI, then the fun really starts. That's when you have to figure out what do to about it. What impacts your win rate the most? How does that impact your priorities? What separates consistently winning from usually losing? Setting your priorities and improving your win rate Your priorities should be determined by your ROI. All opportunity in a company comes from growth. And growth is directly dependent on your win rate. Here are nine places you should consider investing to increase your proposal win rate. Depending on your role, people tend to look at what needs to be done to win business differently. One thing you should quickly learn is that bidding everything can destroy your company before you even realize it. Not only do bad bid decisions destroy your win rate, they turn your future into something random and weak instead of something planned and strong. Learning how to make effective bid decisions is critical for your future. But once you've made the decision you need to properly prepare for your proposals before they start so that you can build them around what it will take to win. This will have a greater impact on your win rate than attempting proposal heroism at the last minute. It's easy to get caught up in the hysteria over lead generation when you need new business right away. But you have to master the balance between short term vs. long term thinking if you want a prosperous future for your company. To maximize your win rate, you need to get into position to win. Keep in mind Keep in mind that what will increase win rate at one company, may cause it to fall at another. For example, if you do a high volume of proposals, your approaches will be different from a company that has a low volume. Likewise, if you are in a low-margin business, you may not be able to afford to approach things the same way that other companies do. Finally, you should also keep in mind that the win rate at other companies, or claims of high win rates by consultants, are completely meaningless. Everybody measures differently. Everybody cherry-picks. Your own win rate must be consistently measured to have any meaning. And yet, win rates are vital. They are the key metric you need to transform into a winning organization.

All proposals are won or lost based on whether the proposal writers have the right input. All. Of. Them. The right input can’t be somehow made up by proposal writers during the proposal. Either it’s brought to them so they can present it or they build a presentation without substance. And it’s best to bring this input at the very beginning, while there is time to do something about it. And this in turn usually means gathering the right input before the RFP hits the street and the proposal starts. This means that being a great proposal writer requires being able to ask for the right input before the proposal event starts. This means that being a company that's good at winning proposals requires getting good at gathering the right inputs before you start your proposals. These inputs fall into four areas: Do you know the price to win? Price is important, even in a best value evaluation. But how important is it? What spread between the lowest price and yours can still win? What will the lowest price submitted be? You might not be able to know these answers with precision. But how well you know (or even guess) can determine whether you win or lose. Do you know what it will take to win? What is the customer looking for? How will they pick the winner? How do they make decisions and trade-offs? What are their preferences? What do they need? What do they like? Everything in proposal writing is about positioning and differentiation. Nothing gets simply described. Everything gets put in context. Everything in proposal writing needs to add up to making you the customer’s best alternative, from their perspective. Your proposal writers simply can’t write a proposal from the customer’s perspective unless they have the input that enables them to see things the way the customer does and to know what information they need to reach a decision in your favor. Can you put it in writing? Most companies know something about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment. Most companies fail at getting that into their proposals effectively. This most often happens because of poor communication from business development and capture to the proposal writers, or through a lack of planning before writing. The problem usually isn’t the writer’s ability to get it on paper, it’s the lack of input. Do you have the right offering? A good price with great proposal writing will still fail unless you deliver the offering the customer wants. Actually, having the customer want your offering is only part of it. Your offering needs to be the customer’s best alternative. Your writers can’t fake that by adding beneficial sounding words while saying they’ll do whatever the RFP asked for. They need the right input regarding what the company intends to propose. What do you do with the input once you’ve got it? How you accumulate and stage the information prior to writing is critical. How do you allocate what you know to the proposal outline? How should it be presented? How do you validate whether it made it into the proposal? Once you collect the right input, you should put it into a proposal content plan, so that the writers can account for it and your proposal reviewers can validate that it was properly addressed. Are you guessing at winning or are you working at winning? At a 30% win rate, a 10% increase in your win rate can be the same as having 40% more leads. It’s worth the work to do more than guess at what should go into your proposals. All you need to do is show up with a great offering design that can be delivered at the right price, with knowledge about the customer’s perspective, how they will make their selection, and how things should be positioned and differentiated. Take that information and put it into a proposal content plan that provides guidance regarding what to write and how. Do this and you can write a great proposal every time. Do this and you will maximize your win rate. Great proposal writing really is this simple.

Balancing the time to plan with the time to write against a deadline is more of an art than a science. The more you can do to accelerate the planning, the more time there is for writing. But don't forget that you have to think things through. If you rush through content planning without thinking things through, which is what an approach based on recycling proposals leads to, you can do more harm than good. Recycling narratives can also hurt because editing text to change the context can take longer than it does to write text that is optimized for the current context. Content Planning provides ways around the problems that you inevitably encounter when trying to recycle proposal narratives. Proposal Content Planning can be combined with reuse. In fact, reusing your plans can make more sense than reusing the narratives. When you combine the two, in addition to reusing text you can use questions, placeholders, instructions, options, and things to consider. You can provide examples, while helping people think things through more quickly. Here are five options for combining reuse and Proposal Content Planning: If you have topics which are the same from proposal to proposal, and not merely similar, it is safe to reuse narrative. But people often think their proposals are the same when they are merely similar, and way underestimate the level of effort required to do the tailoring. A proposal that is optimized to win for one customer, opportunity, and competitive environment is definitely not optimized to win the next unless everything really is the same. If you do not optimize your proposal to win for this customer, this opportunity, and this competitive environment your win rate will suffer. If you have topics which are similar, instead of providing reuse text you can provide instructions for how to do the tailoring. You can also provide placeholders for new or specific things that will need to be created. If you can separate the portions that will not change from the portions that will, you can make the tailoring very efficient and as simple as answering questions. For example, you might have instructions that say “If you are the incumbent, talk about already having the resources. But if you are not the incumbent, explain where you will get the resources.” If what needs to be written depends on circumstances that are always different, you can provide options. You can even use an If-Then-Else structure for your instructions. Options can also be open ended. Even if none of the options is correct for the circumstances of the bid, the options provided can inspire the author to create something that is a perfect match for the current bid. And if you don’t know what will need to be written, possibly because you can’t anticipate what the RFP will require, then you can provide things to consider. Like options, these can provide inspiration, only they are more open ended. They point to areas and not to specifics. You can use considerations to give the writers some things to think about. You can provide lists of possibilities and details that might apply. You don’t have to be certain. The writers can decide what’s applicable. Maybe they’ll think of something else that wasn’t even suggested. But they won’t have to start from scratch. Help them prepare their plans. It’s difficult to prepare a plan in advance for a set of unknown requirements. But you can address what should go into a plan. Your instructions to the proposal writers can suggest things to include in their plans. Maybe reusing content is not the problem Sometimes it’s not the details. Sometimes the writers just need to know what points to make and then they can supply the details. The points you should be trying to make might include: Address strategies as well as approaches. When your company wants to position as the lowest risk, highest quality, better, stronger, or faster, do you have positioning and proof points to suggest? Or do you want to leave it to the writers to figure out? What about your differentiators? Sometimes you follow the same strategies in certain circumstances (incumbent, not the incumbent, introducing new technology, reducing cost, etc.). Sometimes providing strategic options and considerations that match common circumstances is more useful than trying to anticipate or recycle approach details. Proof points that match circumstances. In addition to strategies and approaches, some things like qualifications do not change frequently. Metrics can be very useful as proof points, but difficult to gather. Keeping track of data and proof points relevant to certain circumstances can be very helpful. The same applies to creating quality criteria for your proposals Now apply all of that to your proposal quality criteria: Which are the same from proposal to proposal? Which are conditional? Which are optional? What should be considered? With a good script, you can very quickly assemble bid-specific quality criteria. Instead of reuse of proposal content, consider simply creating proposal quality criteria and making it easy to tailor by explaining what to tailor and how. Giving writers the same quality criteria that your reviewers will use can be even more helpful than giving them some content to recycle when the reviewers will pick it apart and question its applicability. TL;DR Faster proposals do not come from quick copying of something that’s similar and not the same. At least not if you want to be competitive. Faster proposals that don’t compromise your competitiveness come from faster thinking about your strategies, deciding on your approaches, making your points, and having the right quality criteria. And these come from faster Proposal Content Planning instead of recycling narrative. Recycling narrative may not be all bad in the right context. But by the time you do the things that have a bigger impact, the amount of content recycling that makes sense gets smaller and smaller. Recycling proposal narratives becomes a small addition only applicable to a few minor parts of the proposal that you can consider at the end instead of being a place to start.

Proposal Content Plan Quality To do its job, a Proposal Content Plan must achieve certain objectives. It is not simply a summary of what you might write or a collection of placeholders. It should be far more than a simple annotated outline. For example, it should provide instructions for writers and quality criteria for reviewing the proposal. The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the Proposal Content Plan and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the content plan is correct. Do the proposal design, strategies, or offering need to be reconsidered? Do the instructions contain enough information about the approaches that will be written so that the approaches themselves can be validated? Do the instructions leave any gaps or RFP compliance issues? Do the instructions identify all of the customer/ RFP requirements that should be addressed in each section? Do the instructions explain how to maximize your score against the evaluation criteria? Do the instructions advise the writers regarding how to handle any assumptions, limits, boundaries, trade-offs, or risks in your offering? Do the instructions advise the writers regarding any ambiguities or problems in the RFP? Do the instructions provide information about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment that goes beyond what is given in the RFP? Do the instructions explain where and how to add value and show insight? Do the instructions provide sufficient guidance for writers to get everything correct on the first draft? Do the instructions identify the points that should be emphasized or proven in each section? Do the instructions contain references to any helpful data or information that should be incorporated or consulted? Will the content plan produce the right proposal if followed? Do the instructions identify where projects, experience, proof points, or examples should be cited? Does the content plan also provide sufficient quality criteria so that writers and reviewers will be able to assess whether the sections have been properly completed? Do the quality criteria provide a sufficient definition for what proposal quality is and reflect what it will take to win this proposal?

Proposal Outline Quality The proposal outline should be fully validated prior to writing the proposal based on it. Changes in the proposal outline after writing starts can be very disruptive and should be avoided by thoroughly reviewing the proposal outline. The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the proposal outline and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the outline is correct. Is the outline organized according to the RFP instructions? Will the customer be able to find things where they expect to find them, based on the RFP? Does the outline also address any evaluation criteria? Will the customer find it clear where to find things relevant to their scoring of your proposal and completion of their evaluation forms? Have your organized your response to the technical requirements according to the RFP so that the customer will be able to find where in your proposal you have responded to each requirement? Do all proposal headings match their corresponding RFP requirements so that customers can find things using keyword searches? Are you at risk of the customer not finding something because it is not organized or labelled the same way as in the RFP? If the customer evaluates by following the RFP instead of your outline, will they be able to find everything they are looking for?

Compliance Matrix Quality A compliance matrix should be fully validated prior to writing the proposal based on it. Changes in the outline or allocation of RFP requirements to the proposal after writing starts can be very disruptive. Reviewing a compliance matrix can take as long as it did to create the compliance matrix in the first place. Nonetheless, ensuring the compliance matrix is accurate is absolutely vital to proposal success. The following is intended to be used as a checklist both by the author of the compliance matrix and by any subsequent reviewers to ensure that the compliance matrix is correct. These criteria should be applied to every row in your compliance matrix. Does the compliance matrix reflect all relevant RFP requirements? Are any RFP requirements that require a written response missing from the matrix? Do any RFP requirements in the matrix need to be parsed into separate items so they may be allocated to proposal sections individually? Is each RFP requirement in the matrix linked to the correct proposal sections? Is each proposal section linked to all RFP requirements that should be written to in that section? Are all judgment calls and RFP interpretations valid and do they reflect what the customer intended? Will the proposal produced by following the compliance matrix reflect what the customer wants to see in the proposal?

How do you know if your proposal is any good? How do you know if it reflects what it will take to win? Is it just a matter of opinion? Whose opinion? How you do break the cycle of inconsistent and ineffective reviews that do more harm than good? Introducing Proposal Quality Validation Online training for Proposal Quality Validation:: the way most companies do their proposal reviews is broken. Proposal Quality Validation can help you increase your competitiveness and win what you submit, by improving the way you assess proposal quality. The benefits of using Proposal Quality Validation: Writers don't have to guess at what reviewers want. Reviews are not subjective opinion-fests that do more harm than good. You can consider all the different things you need to consider when reviewing a proposal, without overloading your reviewers and asking them to look at more issues in one sitting than is humanly possible. Everyone gets on the same page regarding what a quality proposal is. How to achieve this goal The foundation of a consistently effective review process is something that almost every company lacks: a written definition of proposal quality that can be turned into criteria to be used during proposal reviews. It is such a simple and obvious thing, but almost every company we encounter still uses outdated, subjective, unscoped review practices. Proposal Quality Validation separates what you review from how you review it. What you review matters more than how you review it. Your proposal process should surface the criteria you need to define quality based on what it will take to win. Then you have as many reviews, conducted in whatever ways make sense, at whatever times make sense, to validate that the proposal fulfills the criteria. Proposal Quality Validation requires you to: Define proposal quality in writing. If you can't define it, you can't validate it. If it isn't written down, you can't get everyone on the same page regarding what proposal quality is. Create quality criteria to use during proposal reviews. This is usually done during Proposal Content Planning. But the quality criteria are what you use to determine whether you've fulfilled your definition of proposal quality. Use the quality criteria during writing as well as during reviews. Give the quality criteria to the proposal writers when they receive their assignments so they can self-review their work. Plan your validation reviews and validate the plan itself. Think through and document the number of proposal reviews you need to validate all your quality criteria and how many proposal reviewers should participate. Then hold a review of the plan prior to implementation to ensure that it will meet standards and expectations for this pursuit. Train reviewers to validate against quality criteria instead of rendering opinions. They can still make comments, but that should come after the quality criteria have been validated. Achieving consistently effective proposal reviews requires that proposal writers and reviewers work from the same expectations regarding proposal quality. Achieving this in turn requires defining the criteria your reviewers will use to assess proposal quality before the writing starts, so that the writers know what they need to deliver. Those criteria should reflect what it takes to win. When you put all that together, it not only defines your proposal process, it enables you to make achieving consistently effective proposal reviews checklist simple. Having a review team leader to implement Proposal Quality Validation can be a big help. Options for implementing Proposal Quality Validation: The best approach for you will depend on your circumstances and the nature of your bids. Completely customize your validation approach. Define all criteria specifically for a given pursuit. Complete a form for each review to allocate criteria to phases and reviewers. Best for unique solutions bids or situations where you need Proposal Quality Validation, but there it has never been tried before in that organization. This is a high level of effort for the maximum possible improvement approach to proposal quality. Checklist-driven. You can accelerate Proposal Quality Validation without watering down your quality criteria. But it takes some investment ahead of time to make your reviews go quicker and easier. Collaborative validation. It's not always possible to have an objective review by people not involved in the proposal. Maybe that's not what you really need. Maybe instead of draft reviews what you really need is to validate the decisions you make about what you are proposing. Maybe instead of open-ended editing and comments looking for defects, reviewers should provide instructions to the proposal team. Instead of finding fault, maybe reviews should be a teaching moment. Focus on self-assessment instead of reviews. Rely on proposal contributors to meet the quality criteria. While there is no "validation" of successful criteria fulfillment, in small organizations, there might not be any people not working on the proposal to provide a separate review. Self-assessment may be the only option. So do it right by providing quality criteria. Proposal risks and issue tracking. If you lose, the odds are extremely high that it will be because of a risk or issue that you knew about but did not sufficiently mitigate. Hybrids. You can mix and match the various options for implementing Proposal Quality Validation. You can have checklist-driven collaborative validation. Or you can use a completely customized approach, but supplement and accelerate it using checklists. How you implement the procedures is less important than that you achieve the level of validation you need. Contract these approaches with the one approach that most companies use. We call it proposal sight reading. While sight reading a proposal can provide quick feedback when needed, it does not maximize your chances of winning as much as Proposal Quality Validation. Sight reading can be improved by introducing simple criteria and learning how to tell if a proposal is well-written to form a watered down version of Proposal Quality Validation for when you haven't properly defined your proposal quality criteria. Alternatives approaches to reviewing your proposals To better understand proposal reviews, see also: Should your reviews be objective? Is that even possible? Can you cancel your reviews and still improve your proposal quality? Once simple thing you can do to transform your proposal reviews The benefits of making proposal reviews about teaching instead of defects The break/fix model for quality control doesn’t work that well for proposal development. Having experienced people show up and look for problems is not the best way to achieve a great proposal. The comments are inconsistent and either come too little too late, or too many too late. And this type of review often requires a highly disruptive production effort. The idea that you need a team of people outside the proposal team to be objective is useful, but not always possible. And not as useful as you might think. You need input, guidance, and validation from your experienced staff all along the way and not just their help finding defects late in the game. One alternative is to make them part of the collaborative process and build your quality process around collaboration instead of proofreading. Another alternative is to cancel the reviews and focus on designing quality in from the beginning instead. You can use the quality criteria guidance from our Proposal Quality Validation methodology to help with this. If you are going to persist in having open-ended read the proposal and comment on it style reviews, at least get good at it. Call it what it is: sight reading. You can improve the results you get from sight reading by training your reviewers in what to look for. Take all of your quality criteria, and condense them into the 5 or so most important things or root causes of problems and turn it into a review checklist. Essentially it's a form of minimal preparation, watered down Proposal Quality Validation for when you just can't get people to define and focus on quality instead of reading. Also, we’ve found that when you make reviews about guidance instead of detecting defects you get better results. Proposal Reviews are a teaching moment. Take advantage of all the experience participating in your reviews and enlist them as teachers instead of critics. Of course that only reinforces the importance of doing the teaching, in the form of defining quality and quality criteria, before the writing even starts. But you have to start somewhere. Another alternative is the customer-emulation review. This is when you score the proposal against the evaluation criteria, doing so as closely to the way the customer will do it as possible. It is surprising how rarely this provides useful improvement. It is better to apply this line of thought to designing quality in at the beginning. Customer emulation reviews do not conflict with Proposal Quality Validation. If one (or more) of your quality criteria relate to achieving the highest possible evaluation score (and they probably should), then validating the fulfillment of that criteria by emulating the customer can be a very good thing. But you probably should validate more than just how it reads. You should validate whether the outline reflects the customer's expectations, whether the copy includes all of the relevant RFP keywords, how easy it is to find where to score each evaluation criteria, etc. A customer-emulation review is good, but quality validation is more reliable. The combination may be the best approach. Frequently Asked Questions about implementing Proposal Quality Validation After reviewing all of the material we've published, you might still have some of these questions and the answers might help guide your implementation. How do you know when you've achieved this goal? Here is a checklist you can use to assess whether your Proposal Quality Validation plan is sufficient to achieve your goals. One of the most important quality reviews you will perform on this proposal is the one that validates that this content plan will produce the desired proposal. If you start writing without performing this review, you put the entire proposal at risk. Proposal Content Planning is a necessary part of Proposal Quality Validation.